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Cocaine Art Has Arrived

View attachment 42955Masters of art work in mediums of many different kinds: paint, clay, sky letters from the back of a jet plane. There's like, probably a couple more. And now, ​cocaine.

Erick here, a music producer in the Netherlands, has dedicated his life, more or less, to cocaine. He's got the chemical structure for the drug—a methyl, a benzo, an octane-2-carboxylate, ​etc—tattooed on his chest. And he has now dedicated his life to making, quite literally, ​art with cocaine.

It's about what you'd expect. We've seen frat boys cut up lines with their initials or some such, but Erick has taken that to a new level. Over the last seven months, he's chopped up anthrax symbols, the Facebook and Instagram logos (to promote his brand, naturally), music notes, demons, and the Nike swoosh. It's not exactly fine art. But it is quite bold.

And the specific "pieces" Erick does don't really matter, he says. The medium is the message.

"This isn't powder, this isn't sugar or flour or anything else. It's really cocaine," Erick said, as he snorted a line on a Skype call with me. "I'm doing it, and I like it, and it's my body." I have no real reason to doubt him, though I suppose it's possible that he did a bunch of lines of flour on our 20-minute call.

The message is a pretty straightforward one: The war on drugs is bad, and the best way to fight it is to be as blunt and open as possible about his cocaine use. He says he's been using every day, more or less, for most of the recent past.

He says he has enough money and connections from producing music to have a pretty constant supply of cocaine. And he has never had to deal with the police.

"The sad fact is, if you have money you don't have any problems with law enforcement. I'm open about this, and I've never been in the back of a police car," he said. "But if, you know, a regular person is caught with even a little bit of coke, I think they'd have problems."

There are no plans to take this to a gallery or really make any money off of it, he's just doing it because he likes it. In the interview, he asked if he could make me any art. I asked for the Motherboard 'M' logo. An hour later, he sent me the photo you see above.

"It's 25-30 grams," he said. "I know it's a lot, but the logo is really big."